Future of Cities (Financial Times special section)

Today's Financial Times has a special magazine supplement focused on cities, with a bunch of interesting articles. "The heart of the city" by Professor Ricky Burdett makes important points about cities and innovation, particularly transportation. From (most of) the article:

The way cities are planned, managed and inhabited can make a dramatic difference to their social and economic wellbeing. Cities can, and do, perform in very different ways.

When it comes to energy consumption, the sheer size of a city’s footprint – how sprawling it is – determines the distances people have to travel and how they commute to work.

In spite of its relative poverty, the ever-expanding Mexico City, for example, has one of the highest rates of car ownership in the world – 360 cars per 1,000 people, more than London and twice as much as the dense and more compact New York.

But cities can be designed, or retrofitted, to work. Owing to a century-old programme of investment in public transport in London and New York, only a third of New Yorkers and 40 per cent of Londoners travel by car to work, with more than 95 per cent of the latter’s richest people using public transport on their daily commute into the City of London.

These patterns have a significant impact on the energy budget of a city, suggesting that a more compact, less sprawling urban environment – supported by a robust public transport system – is not only more efficient (it takes up less land) but also more effective at moving large numbers of people at less environmental cost.

Cities are, in the end, about people and not about systems. The design of the urban infrastructure – its housing, streets, squares and public places – strongly affects the potential for social inclusion and integration. This is critical to the way urban societies accommodate rather than exacerbate differences between social groups of diverse social, ethnic and economic backgrounds.

Like human bodies, over time, cities concentrate problems – congestion, consumption, pollution, violence and inequality. But because they bring people together, they have the resources and capacity to innovate and adapt.

In the past decade alone, cities in Latin America, Asia, the US and Europe have shown exceptional resilience, coming up with creative solutions that have made them cleaner, safer and more equitable.

Bogotá introduced cycle paths and a bus rapid transit system to reduce congestion, and placed public spaces and well-designed schools at the heart of its exploding slums; New Delhi replaced belching, diesel vehicles with natural-gas-powered bus systems and auto-rickshaws, dramatically lowering pollution levels; and Copenhagen and Seattle have brought people back to live in their city centres, thus promoting green transport and lifestyles.

Without exception, these initiatives have been the result of a powerful mayor – the new city doctor – who has understood his city’s DNA, identified its problems and come up with a “cure” to turn them around. Cities, it turns out, can be healed as long as the diagnosis and the treatment are correct.